Anti War Activists

"Praying without ceasing is not ritualized, nor are there even words. It is a constant state of awareness of oneness with God; it is a sincere seeking for a good thing; and it is a concentration on the thing sought, with faith that it is obtainable."

"In the final analysis you find spiritual truth through your own higher nature. Your higher nature is a drop in the ocean of God - and has access to the ocean. Sometimes your higher nature is awakened through the inspiration of beautiful surroundings or beautiful music, bringing you insights of truth. Sometimes you see the truth written or hear the truth spoken, and your higher nature confirms it. Or you directly perceive the truth from the inside through an awakening of the higher nature, which is my way. All the inspired writing came from the inner source, and you too can receive from that source. Be still and know."

"Never think of any right effort as being fruitless. All right effort bears fruit, whether we see the results or not."

"A PILGRIM IS A WANDERER WITH A PURPOSE. A pilgrimage can be to a place — that's the best known kind — but it can also be for a thing. Mine is for peace, and that is why I am a Peace Pilgrim."

"When you approach others in judgement they will be on the defensive. When you are able to approach them in a kindly, loving manner without judgement they will tend to judge themselves and be transformed."

"There is great freedom in simplicity of living."

"This is the way of peace — overcome evil with good, and falsehood with truth, and hatred with love."

"Please don't say lightly that these are just religious concepts and not practical. These are laws governing human conduct, which apply as rigidly as the law of gravity. When we disregard these laws in any walk of life, chaos results. Through obedience to these laws this world of ours will enter a period of peace and richness of life beyond our fondest dreams. The key word for our time is practice. We have all the light we need, we just need to put it into practice."

"Peace Pilgrim's Pocket" How old are you, Peace?/I am ageless!/Only three things in her pocket/comb toothbrush postage stamps/With those three possessions she lived/so many (secret number) years/making millions of friends/hiking byways and back roads/crossing the nation again and again/town to town thousands of miles/unafraid/"Life is a mirror!/Smile at it, it smiles back!"/woman with a white bun/striding by herself in a navy blue tunic/white tennis shoes/no money no credit cards no tickets/opening her mouth wherever people would listen/"Never stop your efforts for peace!"/walking till someone offered a bed/fasting till they offered food/"Personal peace necessary before world peace! Every good thing you say... vibrates on and on/and never ceases!"/I am standing outside under ageless pecan trees/listening to the voice I first heard in my/parents' living room/as a girl of three/"Would you kill a cow?/The three-year-old said, Never!/"Then how can you eat meat? Why let someone else do your dirty work for you?" She was thrilled to turn kids into vegetarians/"I'm only a little person but/there are lots of little things to be done!"

"Stop being an escapist! Stop being a surface liver who stays right in the froth of the surface. There are millions of these people, and they never find anything really worthwhile. Be willing to face life squarely and get down beneath the surface of life where the verities and realities are to be found."

"I shall remain a wanderer until mankind has learned the way of peace; walking until given shelter and fasting until given food."

"I deal with spiritual truth which should never be sold and need never be bought. When you are ready it will be given."

"Material things must be put into their proper place. They are there for use. It's all right to use them; that's what they're there for. But when they've outlived their usefulness, be ready to relinquish them and perhaps pass them on to someone who does need them. Anything that you cannot relinquish when it has outlived its usefulness possesses you, and in this materialistic age a great many of us are possessed by our possessions. We are not free."

"What people really suffer from is immaturity. Among mature people war would not be a problem — it would be impossible. In their immaturity people want, at the same time, peace and the things which make war. However, people can mature just as children grow up. Yes, our institutions and our leaders reflect our immaturity, but as we mature we will elect better leaders and set up better institutions. It always comes back to the thing so many of us wish to avoid — working to improve ourselves."

"I HAD A VERY FAVORABLE BEGINNING, although many of you might not think so. I was born poor on a small farm on the outskirts of a small town, and I'm thankful for that. I was happy in my childhood. I had a woods to play in and a creek to swim in and room to grow. I wish that every child could have growing space because I think children are a little like plants. If they grow too close together they become thin and sickly and never obtain maximum growth. We need room to grow."

"I define “politics” in this sense as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create—not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions. There is no way I can see that the poet can stand outside all that...when you ask, “Do you write political poetry?” I say yes, I have done so since the mid-sixties and the artists’ protests against the Vietnam War. As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry. What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion. What I’m finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written—out of and amid the dysfunction."

"I began as a formalist because that was the poetic tradition—Anglo-European—that I first knew. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson were there of course, but Dickinson’s work was edited into a prim textual conformity until 1960 when the poems in their original form exploded my ideas of poetry. Also, my own life pushed me beyond the conventions of formalism—along with reading my direct contemporaries who were exploring open forms, like Denise Levertov, W.S. Merwin, and Galway Kinnell. All this was in the Sixties when the most intense life was lived around politics—the Black Civil Rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, very large moral questions were in the air, along with a great deal of hope, and the revolutions in Africa and Central America were part of that consciousness. That period has been trashed by the Right as mere posturing, violence and drug abuse. But it was in many ways both a practical and a visionary time."

"A series of poems by a lot of poets have been up in the New York subway. The head of the Transit Authority is a lover of poetry and he decided he wanted "poetry in motion." I was very happy to see that. The same thing has been done in the bus system in San Diego, California, and I think it should be happening everywhere. I think the question of "how do we get people to read poetry?" might be to some extent resolved if people saw more poetry out in the world, places where they go, in just the ordinary public places where everybody has to stand on line, or hang from the strap, waiting, because people would be reading poetry. They would find themselves reading it and absorbing it...I hope many people who saw that poem ("Delta") in the subway thought, "Yes-you can't wrap me up in the story of my life. I am more complicated than you can know.""

"Over many years (I am almost 72) so many poets have touched my imagination and opened paths for me—it hardly makes sense to list them. I have always read a great deal of poetry. Some poets—like Robert Lowell, Denise Levertov, Randall Jarrell, Jean Valentine, Audre Lorde, Hayden Carruth, Jane Cooper, June Jordan, Joy Harjo, Clayton Eshelman—have been my friends, we’ve been comrades in exchanging work and encouraging each other… But I’ve also been powerfully affected by Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Muriel Rukeyser, Aimé Césaire, Robert Duncan—poets I met briefly if at all. Baudelaire, Sachs, Celan, Ghalib, Mandelstam…all in translation. This kind of influence isn’t textual, exactly—it’s like having windows open on “what is possible.” And this kind of intensive reading of many poets, and dialogues with a few, seems to me more fertilizing to a poet’s life than immersion in workshops."

"("What do you get from those people listening to you here? What happens between you and the audience at a reading?") I have to say again that the kinds of support and the kinds of challenge that I receive from the lives of others around me-poets, non-poets, other kinds of artists, and activists-carries me. I don't feel like a solitary person in my lonely room at all, even though I have to spend hours alone in a room to do what I do. I believe that a poem isn't completed until there's a reader at the other end of it. It can't just be produced, it also has to be received. And so, yes, I feel that the poems are being completed in so many different ways by so many different minds and consciousnesses."

"I intend to go on making poetry. I intend to go on trying to be part of what I think of as an underground stream-of voices resisting the voices that tell us we are nothing, that we are worthless, or that we all hate each other, or should hate each other. I think that there is a real culture of resistance here-of artists' and of other kinds of voices-that will continue, however bad things get in this country. I want to make myself part of that and do my work as well as I can. I want to love those I love as well as I can, and I want to love life as well as I can."

"I think poets should work in the non-literary, non-academic world, get to know more than a workshop or a university."

"I have been exceptionally privileged to be able to think of myself as a creative person. There is so much creativity I believe in every infant born and yet so few of us get to develop it, so few of us even get to think about having an audience for our words. So, with the kind of audience that I now have, I want to speak responsibly and for that I need teachers."

"I think there are many different kinds of dread for many different kinds of people. I think that more and more people feel uncared for, feel that their lives are not only unvalued but meaningless, feel that though they may care for their lives, no one else will, feel that the only way that they can protect their survival and interests is by the gun. I'm afraid that many people feel an enormous desperation which plays into the propaganda of hate."

"A sense of community seems to arise out of the word. Well, that's true. I believe that. I think that's one of the reasons that communities of poetry, and I don't just mean communities of poets, but everywhere in this country communities of poetry-of people reading poetry, listening to poetry, coming together around poetry-are becoming so widespread. It's as if this gathering around the word occurs in response to worsening conditions."

"when I say "radical" I mean at the root, real. Real social transformation, real change has to come out of a love of life and a love for the world, not hatred of the world. Increasingly what I fear and what I see is a movement of people on the right who are moving from a hatred of human beings, a hatred of the other, a hatred of life. That's why I say there is nothing wrong with personal happiness if you can take it and use it as a key, a measure, a standard."

"from a very young age poetry was always a sustenance for me. It was a way of going deeper into things, it was never escapism. It was a way, as a very young child, of finding out about life...(it told me) many things. And they contradicted each other, of course, but it was a way of reflecting on and maybe testing out emotions and feelings that I had no words for myself."

"I believe that poetry asks us to consider the quality of life. Poetry reflects on the quality of life, on us as we are in process on this earth, in our lives, in our relationships, in our communities. It embodies what makes it possible for us to continue as human under the barrage of brute violence, numbing indifference, trivialization, and shallowness that we endure, not to speak of what has come to seem in public life like a total loss on the part of politicians of any desire even to appear consistent, or to appear to adhere to principle."

"I think politics can seem a burden when we feel alone and powerless against enormous and impersonal forces out there in the public realm. The late years of the Vietnam War when a lot of poets were giving antiwar readings was a very crucial time for me. In the 1960s, when poetry was very much part of public life, I began trying to make connections for myself between the havoc being wreaked by my government on a small country thousands of miles away, which I and so many of my friend were protesting, and the relations between human beings within my country, especially the relations between women and men. That kind of synthesis really wasn't happening yet in the public sphere, but I was trying to make that synthesis in my poetry-which was the only way I knew how to do it."

"I am a citizen of a country that has just undergone a thieved election, a country deeply and dangerously divided between rich and poor, but also between rich and middle class. What I believe in and what my government represents are not the same thing."

"Something has to die in order for us to begin to know our truths. Perhaps we have to lose our national fantasies."

"Experience is always larger than language. And there's always the next poem, yes. Not necessarily because I feel I've falsified something, but because I wrote it as I knew it then, and I'm going to know it differently in six months. Or I'm going to know something else. Or I'm going to need to know something else, and the only way I can get to it is by writing that poem."

"we teachers used to talk a lot about who fails the teacher or the student-when you have a classroom situation which is rigged entirely against the student, or in which the teacher is too ignorant to teach. Not ignorant of grammar, but ignorant of the students, ignorant of their culture. So, I was thinking very much about our failures, the map of our failures, we who consider ourselves so possessed of language, so articulate."

"language is this medium that we hand back and forth between us in all human relationships all the time, it doesn't really have a privileged place. It's this coinage in which we keep trying to get a hold of each other or make ourselves clear. So, the fact that poetry was available to me for that is very important."

"I think we're at a very interesting watershed, because I have been seeing and noting a tremendous renaissance of poetry in the United States over the past ten to twenty years nourished by the voices of many groups which had been largely silenced before that-by the voices of women, the voices of people of color, the voices of gay men and lesbians, the voices of working-class, white Americans. There is a seething, burgeoning poetry out there, but it's many poetries, and it's coming from many cultures and many communities."

"One of the most sensual and sensuous women poets I can think of is Audre Lorde. She thinks in images that are most certainly lesbian images. But also images from Afro-Caribbean culture and from African mythology and experience. And that's a very powerful combination. Because that also has not been available in most poetry in English."

"(“Costs-in a word. So much of your work has been a struggle to speak honestly and openly, whether about poetry itself or about social issues, about racism, about lesbianism. What are the costs of doing so, as a poet, as a person?") What would be the cost of not doing it? I feel as though it's for my survival, first and foremost. This is how I cope, this is how I survive. I have learned from my peers that this way of creating can be a way of surviving. I didn't invent that."

"(What do you think when you look around this festival and you see Japanese American poets, Chinese American poets, Puerto Rican poets, poets from the white working class?) I feel enormous joy and exhilaration. This is so different from the poetry world into which I was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s. That was a world dominated by a few major figures, mostly from a certain class and of course male: Pound, Williams, Eliot, Stevens. I was saying to a young man, a poet working here, "Your generation doesn't have to look at the field of poetry as a hierarchy. You can draw from this enormously rich cluster of poetries, and you can enrich yourself from so many kinds that this is a wholly different situation than we had in the 1940s and 1950s.""

"For a very long time, poems were a way of talking about what I couldn't talk about any other way. And why is it that you're not able to talk about certain things? It's because they are the points of danger, you feel that in the social fabric, you feel there are people who don't want you to raise this question, or if you're a child-to ask this question. That is the threatening place, and of course it becomes a place of great fascination too. I was equipped from a very young age to use language in this way because of how I was brought up, and by whom I was brought up, and the fact that poetry was available to me as a choice, when it might not have been for another seven or ten years if I'd been another child."

"One of the things that has been growing in the women's movement in this country-and again, in a society like this it can't, it doesn't happen easily, and it doesn't happen overnight-is the consciousness that we aren't a homogeneous movement, that we are a multi-ethnic movement, that women's experiences across the board are different, even though we share common female experiences. There's been a tremendous enrichment through those understandings, and through the visibility, the leadership, of women of color, and the work of Jewish feminists; that has certainly been part of the last few years."

"An enormous amount is happening globally-different kinds of struggle in different countries, in different societies. When you look at South Africa, there's enormous leadership by women. Black women in South Africa are maintaining and creating a structure. In that violence-ridden society, in the midst of revolution, they are creating childcare centers, soup kitchens, planting gardens, keeping things going on that human level. Now I don't think that's just women doing the service work of the world; those women are also leaders of their communities. We could talk about feminism in the Philippines, in Latin America, in the Caribbean, not a monolithic global movement but many movements, all over the world, contending within and against many different cultures. The United States movement is only a small part of the picture."

"Some people are tired and burnt-out, but I see new women and men-coming along all the time. And that is very refreshing and very inspiring. It's not as though the same cast of characters that was there in the early seventies still has to be doing it all now. The cast of characters has grown; some have left, some have taken time out and returned, others have come in, many with new understandings, with new contributions."

"at the time I started writing, that was already set up as a problem. If you were going to be writing a truly new poetry, could you use the old forms?"

"I guess what I'm searching for always is a way of staying linked to the past, pulling out of it whatever you can use, and continuing to move on."

"(question about democracy) It is more than troubled. I mean, it may be sliding out of our grasp. It goes without saying that this has never been a full democracy. It has always been a selective democracy, offering a few people the full enjoyment of a democratic society, but it has always been repressive toward certain groups, and I don't think that it is less so now. I think we're seeing a failure of the democratic dream and a cynicism toward that dream, so that the dream becomes mere rhetoric in the mouths of politicians and corporations."

"People have to put bread on the table and they're trying to do political work as well."

"One of the insidious rhetorical devices of the U.S. Right has been to claim (for example) that empathy with others is merely “liberal guilt” or “political correctness,” that compassion is merely sentimental or even hypocritical. I see it as an entirely cynical view that underscores the profit motive as the only real basis for human relationships."

"We don't shed racism or sexism because we're in a liberation movement unless we struggle hard to try to create bridges, to find out where our common base is, to become educated in each other's realities, to search for and document the mistakes of the past so we can stop making them. I'm thinking particularly of the history of the nineteenth-century white suffrage movement, the early North American feminist movement, its visions, and its racist stances, despite its roots in the Abolitionist movement."

"I grew up in a social and familial world in which there was a great deal of splitting. I've written an essay called "Split at the Root" which actually speaks about my own family roots: Jewish and Gentile. But it was also a world very split by segregation. Baltimore in the thirties and forties was a deeply segregated city. There weren't back-of-the-bus rules, but Black people did not shop in the same department stores as white people, there was the interracial eating taboo, and so on. That kind of thing a child grows up acutely aware of, even if it's never talked about, and of course there was a great deal of pressure not to talk about it. It was a given. And it was a given that, needless to say, white people were extremely tense about. But we learned not to ask questions about it or to discuss it. We did not go to school with Black children. The Black people that I grew up knowing all worked for white people as domestic workers. So that left a profound impact, in the sense that it was a situation which, I think from a very young age, I felt was so-uncomfortable is hardly the word-almost intolerable. There was so much that wasn't explained, there were codes of behavior that you couldn't question but that you couldn't figure out...When the Civil Rights movement came long in the late fifties, early sixties, and I began to hear Black voices describing and analyzing what were the concrete issues for Black people, like segregation, like racism, it came to me as a great relief. It was like finding language for something that I'd needed a language for all along. That was the first place where I heard a language to name oppression. And it was an enormous relief, even as it threw up a lot of questions for me as to where I stood with all this."

"this is an ignorance that is damaging both to women and to men. Ignorance of the history of more than half the human species. And therefore the history of the entire species is distorted. In some ways we have come a long way; in other ways, I think, not at all. And then outside of the sphere of the kind of education where you would expect to find a certain liberal stance toward feminism, the issue becomes what women have any education available to them at all. Thinking on a global level, how early do women leave school, if they've gone to school at all? The illiteracy rate among women overall is rapidly on the increase. And so it's not just a question of, do we know our history, but do we know how to read, how to write? Do we know that there is such a thing as history, that we can be part of it, makers of it?"